Marin Voice: Technology is hacking into our humanity

I’m amazed by what a computer can accomplish. Emails make volunteering much easier and I really enjoy my e-book reader. But please understand: I rely on a landline phone, I don’t text and I’ve never been involved with social media.

I’ve lived long enough to remember the attack on Pearl Harbor and World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, as well as the Cold War’s possibility of nuclear annihilation. As devastating as those battles were, none compares with the challenge now facing humanity.

I call it the challenge of technology.

I was first concerned with technology in the 1940s when televisions arrived. As a child, I imagined families gathering around a fireplace sharing their stories and dreams. But once this new technology arrived in my home, our family was hunched in front of a tiny TV as people on a screen, not us, were talking and dreaming.

Then, in the late-1950s, as a young adult, a friend liked to joke that people watch television because, if they stared at the wall, we’d all think they’re crazy. I’d laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. People’s free time was increasingly being taken up by television.

Now, 60 years later, technology plays an infinitely greater role in everyone’s life. People can get cash from an ATM at any hour, so who needs bank tellers? Many children spend their days indoors with video games, so fewer bother to exercise outside. Cars all but direct and drive themselves – where did the informative gas-station attendants and road maps go?

In the future, I wonder what humans will be doing. We should all recognize that we are being marginalized — or rendered insignificant — by technology.

Technology isn’t evil. It helps me in countless ways. However, in today’s world, if you don’t have a definite idea of what you want to do during your time on this planet, technology is there to control your life for you. We’ve all seen people walking a dog in a scenic setting while staring at a smartphone. Are they controlling technology or is technology beginning to control them?

In the time of Greek philosopher Socrates, or even during the era of French philosopher Albert Camus, it was relatively easy to discover one’s purpose in life or to know what one wanted from life. Today, answering such questions is difficult.

I believe answering these questions is because technology has at least a 75-year lead on humanity and it now impacts much of our thought processes. So it’s urgent humans personally answer such questions as: Has technology made my life any easier? Has technology made me any happier? Why am I living?

It’s true that bad actors can hack into our computers and bank accounts. But that’s not the only hacking going on. Technology hacks into our humanity.

Through numerous algorithms, technology is monitoring our health and tracking where we go, what we buy, whom we talk to and even what we look like.

In the future, one way or another, technology will use this data to exert more and more control. While doing this, instead of uniting humanity, social media is dividing us and artificial intelligence is taking away our jobs.

All of us who pay attention know this is happening. If that’s what you want, fine. Feel free to kick back and enjoy the ride. But if you want to retain your humanity in order to keep technology in its place, you’re going to have to work harder than Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tinder and TikTok.

We are all going to have to personally figure out who we are and what we want from life. My many years of living have taught me this.

Jim Wood is co-founder and senior writer for Marin Magazine. He and his wife Nikki live in Tiburon.